9

The ghost of Stalinism

By the early 1970s, the CPA was a shadow of a once-formidable political and industrial organisation. Split into three separate parties, with an ageing and shrinking membership, and its power in the trade unions greatly diminished, the influence of its ideology in Australia was at its lowest ebb since the early 1930s. The party had suffered two catastrophic splits: the first in the early 1960s, and the second a decade later, both centred on the legacy of Stalinism.

In the early 1960s, a small but influential section left to form a pro-Beijing party, embracing Mao’s line that Stalin had basically pursued the correct communist line, and stridently denouncing Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin’s crimes. In the mid-1960s, an even greater upheaval occurred when a new generation of CPA leaders criticised Moscow’s embrace of neo-Stalinism after Brezhnev purged Khrushchev in 1964. Simmering tensions boiled over when the CPA leadership supported Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring and condemned the 1968 Soviet-led invasion that crushed Czechoslovakia’s experiment in ‘socialism with a human face’. Eventually, one-third of the membership — including many key union leaders — formed a pro-Moscow party in 1971. The hatreds generated by these splits left deep scars.

Santamaria followed these developments, rightly discerning the immense possibilities they opened up for The Movement’s union operations. By then, his organisation was widely known as the National Civic Council (NCC), and this is the name by which it will be frequently called from this point forward, although members still affectionately called it The Movement or The Show.

In December 1970, ASIO obtained Santamaria’s sophisticated analysis of ‘the divisions in the C.P.A.’1 In what reads like an ASIO ‘Position Paper’ written by one of its top analysts, Santamaria observed that the latest CPA split offered ‘vast opportunities in the unions and elsewhere, but only if there are sufficiently trained “cadres” to exploit it’:

If the anti-Communist forces had the resources and handled themselves carefully, there could be nothing but very great gains in this particular field. At the moment, it seems that practically everything in the field of anti-Communist organisation ought to be subordinated to widespread recruitment and training of every possible person who can gain full time positions in unions.2

Santamaria correctly observed that Stalinism was at the core of the divisions. He also understood that bitter personal rivalries invariably surfaced during such factional battles. ‘Fights are not always about the issues which are invoked in the course of the fight,’ he wrote. ‘Fights are often about purely personal issues which are embellished into struggles of principle.’

In the following decade, the consequences of modelling The Movement upon the CPA would consume his own seemingly monolithic organisation, ending in an equally bitter split focussed on a form of ‘Stalinism’ in the NCC. This began in the mid-1970s with deep feuds involving John Maynes, whose authoritarianism caused divisive upheavals in NCC-controlled unions. Maynes had loyally served as Santamaria’s second-in-command as vice president (industrial), but in the early 1980s they had a severe falling-out when Santamaria effectively turned his back on unionism. Maynes was a long-term NCC staffer. For over twenty years, he falsely claimed he was the full-time federal president of the Federated Clerks’ Union, for which he actually only received an honorarium.3

JOHN GRENVILLE was a key figure in the first phase of the NCC’s divisions. Like many who had been drawn to The Movement from the early 1940s onwards, Grenville came from a middle-class Melbourne family. He was educated by the De La Salle brothers at Malvern, then as a boarder at the Marist Brothers-run Assumption College in Kilmore, central Victoria. The Labor Split occurred while he was at Assumption, and inevitably he was drawn into the furious arguments that arose. This greatly influenced Grenville’s views when he enrolled at Melbourne University in 1957 and became active in student politics. He was a founding member of the university DLP Society, and joined the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist) — later the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). The NCC recruited him at the end of 1957.4

He was soon a regular at NCC headquarters, where he first met Santamaria. Steeped in the church’s anti-communist and social-justice teachings, Grenville was drawn to the organisation’s fight ‘against the totalitarian left in the trade union movement’.5 After a period of political inactivity following his marriage in 1963, his value to the NCC emerged when he became a key player in this fight, demonstrating his credentials as an industrial advocate for the municipal officers’ and teachers’ unions, drawing him to Maynes’s attention.

In early 1964, Maynes had helped Mick Jordan succeed Vic Stout as secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council (the Trades Hall), the peak body of Victoria’s unions. In return for delivering the NCC’s votes, Maynes requested that one of his trusted people be appointed to the Trades Hall staff. When the position of research officer became vacant in 1966, Maynes asked Grenville to apply, and Jordan appointed him.6

Working closely with Jordan gave Grenville the opportunity to learn sophisticated industrial skills, also providing a bridge so that NCC policies could be implemented and the communists’ (of various factions) resisted. Strategy and tactics were decided at NCC caucus meetings prior to the weekly Thursday council meeting, which all affiliated unions could attend. The agenda paper would not be issued until Thursday night, but the Trades Hall executive debated and approved it on Wednesdays, giving Grenville advance knowledge. If the agenda was deemed to be of sufficient importance, the caucus would be convened to determine how NCC-controlled unions ‘were going to vote, who the speakers would be, and the general gist of the type of argument that would be put forward’.7

It was impossible for Grenville to hide his real allegiances, even though he publicly denied his NCC membership. As he said:

One is immediately known by the other side because of the policies you pursue, stands you take, and any one particular ideological argument is always noted by the other side. I would say that I can always tell a member of the Communist Party who claims that he isn’t, in terms of the way he’s performing. So that they would have known exactly the way I was performing. Now, put that into the broad spectrum of the middle group that you might talk about in the Trades Hall situation, they were well and truly advised by the extreme left that I was an undercover member of the NCC.8

Many communist delegates to Trades Hall were hostile to Grenville, personally as well as politically. Others were polite, even helpful. One in particular summed Grenville up perfectly. George Seelaf, a staunch CPA member, was the Victorian secretary of the meat workers’ union, and, as Grenville recalled:

He came into my office one day and introduced himself. He said to me, ‘I’ve been telling Jordan for a long time that we need someone in here with your type of qualifications. Mind you, I didn’t exactly have you in mind and if I get half a chance I’m going to cut your fucking throat from ear-to-ear. But while you’re here you might as well learn something,’ which he proceeded to impart. I could often go and talk to George about an industrial issue, and he was very competent and his working knowledge of the Victorian system was invaluable, and he made no secret of the fact that he was more than happy to impart it to me. In fact, there was never evidence that George was cutting my f-ing throat from ear-to-ear!9

When Jordan died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1969, Grenville won the subsequent election for assistant secretary of the Trades Hall. ‘And that of course was a predetermined situation in that the NCC operatives … with votes at the Council had caucused and determined that I should be the candidate.’10

By this time, Grenville was a member of the inner sanctum, sharing a close political relationship with Santamaria and attending his weekly lunch at NCC headquarters at Riversdale Road, Hawthorn. These brought together the most senior political and industrial operatives, including Santamaria and Maynes, and DLP leaders such as Senator Frank McManus, Jim Brosnan, and Frank Dowling. While not a formal executive, these lunches functioned as the forum in which the week’s key events were discussed and analysed, often focussed around the issues that would appear in Santamaria’s influential News Weekly column and TV commentary, Point of View. When industrial issues came up, Grenville was a key voice, reporting on events at the Trades Hall, and assessing the prospects of winning the NCC’s position or defeating the left’s proposals. Following these lunches, responsibility for garnering the numbers fell to Grenville.11

But in September 1971, the pressure of ‘wearing an overt hat and a covert hat’ told, and Grenville resigned. Jordan’s death had also completely changed his situation: he had no rapport with his successor. He said the whole experience was ‘rather intense and it does have an effect on you, your physical and mental condition, your family life and so on and it got to the stage where I felt personally that in view of the fact that I was meeting myself coming back it was time to take a breather’. The reaction of his NCC colleagues was intense, and ‘a great deal of pressure was put on me to stay’, including ‘accusations of high treason’ from some, as well as from ‘sympathetic but disappointed people wishing that I would have stayed’.12

Grenville’s first preference was to resign and take a position in an individual union. Sam Benson had recently become the national secretary of the Merchant Service Guild, and offered him the position of industrial officer. However, nothing came of this. Benson later told Grenville that he had informed Santamaria of the proposed appointment, who pressured him to withdraw the offer because of Grenville’s important role at the Trades Hall.

Much later, Grenville was amazed to learn that Santamaria had earlier been prepared to unceremoniously dump him. US state department records revealed that in December 1969 Santamaria had met with US labour attaché (and almost certainly a CIA officer) Emil Lindahl:

… at a lunch at the Victorian Employers Federation where Santamaria was speaking. Santamaria was, according to Lindahl, ‘his usual erudite self’. In a private discussion, Santamaria talked about whether to sacrifice one of his followers John Grenville as the price of achieving unity of the anti-communist forces in Victoria.13

Back in 1971, Grenville knew nothing of Santamaria’s ruminations concerning his ‘sacrifice’, or of his role in canning the job with Benson. He had been a member of the clerks’ union up to this time; but, with no immediate job prospects, he decided to take his young family overseas, so he resigned from the union.14

In October 1972, he returned home, and soon found himself once more at the centre of the NCC’s industrial operations. As he recalled, having been back in the country for less than twenty-four hours, ‘I went to nine o’clock mass at Saint Dominic’s Church at East Camberwell and I quietly drove around the block to have a look at Melbourne town, which I hadn’t seen for quite a while. In the course of that I saw Michael O’Sullivan mowing his lawn outside his house.’ O’Sullivan was well known to Grenville as ‘a full-time operative of the NCC’, of which he later became Victorian president, working closely with Maynes on industrial issues.15

At this time, the NCC was rejoicing that long-time clerks’ union federal secretary Joe Riordan was finally moving on after fourteen years, entering federal parliament at the December election that brought Gough Whitlam to power. Riordan was a special hate-figure for Maynes because, as a committed ALP member, he had obstructed Maynes’s plans to completely dominate the union and use it as an ideological springboard in the union movement. O’Sullivan’s warmth towards Grenville was based on the fact that he ‘would be a good replacement’.16 This proposal coincided with Grenville’s need for full-time work. But in order to achieve this, Maynes had to perform several dodgy manoeuvres.

The first was to ensure that Grenville was a financial member of the clerks’ union, which he duly re-joined on 23 November 1972. The official union receipt indicated that he was employed as a clerk by John I. Taylor and Associates Pty Ltd, Consulting Land Surveyors and Town Planners.17 John Taylor’s brother, Peter, was the NCC’s national finance officer, through whom Maynes made this arrangement. As Grenville said, ‘I never received any salary … from this source.’ But he did need to earn a living while waiting for the clerks’ union job to become available, so, ‘in order to keep me on ice, I was given a desk job in industrial affairs in NCC headquarters’. This job made him eligible to re-join the union, but, as he wryly observed, ‘It wouldn’t have looked too good when one is re-joining the clerks’ union for the purpose of becoming federal secretary to have on one’s application card that the employer is the NCC. So this particular subterfuge of the dummy employer was invented — not by me — for the purpose of concealing the operation.’18

Maynes’s second manoeuvre involved postponing the effect of a new rule that would have required Grenville to have been a financial member continuously for twelve months to be eligible to stand for elected office. Once that had been achieved, he was elected by the clerks’ union federal council on 19 February 1973. This was a significant triumph for the NCC. As Grenville commented, now that the federal secretary ‘was in the hands of a safe, secure, and loyal operator, the position ideologically in the union could change … the union could become a springboard federally for pushing NCC propaganda and policy and be the keystone apparatus in its activities in the trade union movement.’19

But he soon discovered that things were far from satisfactory. In theory, the NCC’s activities in the union were directed by a caucus consisting of members of both organisations. In practice, this caucus did not function. ‘People are told what to do from the top,’ Grenville recalled in 1977. ‘Some degree of window-dressing, of course, is indulged in, but this is simply to enable people to get their riding instructions rather than for them to have any great say in the affairs of the union.’ As Grenville rapidly concluded, ‘I was in the situation where I was second in command to the NCC head office industrial structure.’ Maynes, as federal president of the union, insisted ‘that he had to be on one hand treated as the chief executive officer of the union and on the other hand was the NCC’s national industrial officer, and I — in the notional sense as federal secretary — would be the conduit for orders down the line and feeding information back up the line. So it was pretty much a Stalinistic type of structure.’20

The irony was not lost on Grenville:

The situation as far as I’m concerned was that I was involved in a fight against totalitarianism. Now, that can emanate from the left or the right, but at that time, of course, being on the right, I thought it was strictly the preserve of the left. But the longer I stayed there the more I recognised that we were making exactly the same errors and denying the individual his rights in the democratic sense in exactly the same way as the totalitarian left had deprived members of the clerks’ union of their rights over a period of time prior to the accession of the NCC into the leadership.21

The Movement had been founded in the 1940s because senior Catholic bishops believed that the CPA was using its control of unions to advance communism’s political and ideological cause as a stepping-stone to revolution. But Grenville discovered that the NCC was now manipulating unions it controlled for its own narrow political and ideological purposes.

The tension frequently felt by many communist union officials between purely industrial issues and the political and ideological demands of the party were mirrored in Grenville’s experience:

It was a nuisance, in the obvious sense that I was much more concerned to get on with the industrial job. But the other side of the work was always constantly nagging you. You would be right in the middle of a real industrial situation and working on it, you know, twelve, fourteen hours a day, trying to achieve something. And you’d get some of these stupid NCC-type requests coming across your table that have absolutely nothing to do with what you had been paid to do by the members of the union. And you had to, in effect, don another hat and attend to one of these political-type operations that wasn’t necessarily in the interests of your particular organisation in the industrial sense.22

One of the major distractions faced by Grenville involved Maynes’s operations in other unions. One critical intervention in which he became embroiled concerned a faction fight inside the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (the shop assistants’ union). This was one of the unions won by The Movement from the left in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and was ‘regarded as one of the two major springboards for their ideological offensive’. As Grenville candidly explained, ‘I was part of the hatchet job that was done on Barry Egan, the shop assistants’ national secretary.’23

A long-time ALP member who was also a loyal — but undercover — NCC member, Barry Egan had been a senior manager in the retail industry before becoming NSW secretary of the shop assistants’ union and then, in 1970, federal secretary. His rise had been made possible by the NCC’s control of the union’s federal executive.24 By the mid-1970s, Egan’s decision to take a course decidedly independent of Maynes’s authoritarian control caused a brutal backlash, involving — as Grenville witnessed first-hand — ‘the extraordinary expenditure of thousands and thousands of dollars in litigation in that union to destroy Barry Egan’.25

At Maynes’s direction, the NCC loyalists illegally removed Egan as federal secretary, a manoeuvre that was overturned by the courts, but which only prolonged the inevitable conclusion of the struggle: Egan’s eventual demise in October 1978.26 Egan’s determined opposition to Maynes’s domineering behaviour coincided with a similar brawl in the clerks’ union. As Grenville stated, it was ‘absolutely essential’ that Maynes ‘remain in control of the clerks’ and shop assistants’ unions’.27 To achieve this, Maynes destroyed three loyal NCC members who refused to toe his line down to the last minute detail, two of whom held critical positions as federal secretaries of their unions, and the third as secretary of a powerful union branch.

These three senior unionists were united in their opposition to Maynes’s capricious exercise of the dictatorial powers he possessed as the NCC’s industrial supremo and, especially, his profligate misuse of members’ funds to pursue ideological campaigns far removed from their industrial interests. One major focus of their mounting anger was Maynes’s extraordinary globe-trotting jaunts, in which he linked up with discredited international ‘unionists’ whose real loyalties lay with the US government, and who actively participated in the increasingly unsavoury operations of the CIA.